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Matt Zimmerman

Matt Zimmerman was a Senior Staff Attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, focusing on civil liberties, free speech, and privacy law. He is particularly interested in how anonymity, free expression, and online activism are affected by Internet intermediaries. His practice further includes ongoing work in intellectual property law as well as government transparency issues. Previously, Matt worked at the international law firm Morrison & Foerster LLP, where he focused on technology and commercial litigation matters, and the nonprofit advocacy organization The First Amendment Project, where he specialized in privacy and free speech issues. He earned his law degree from Columbia University and his undergraduate degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

As the year draws to a close, EFF is looking back at the major trends influencing digital rights in 2013 and discussing where we are in the fight for free expression, innovation, fair use, and privacy. Click here to read other blog posts in this series.

A New Jersey federal district court judge on Friday will hear oral arguments in a challenge to an overbroad state law that, if upheld, would threaten to undermine bedrock legal protections for online speech.

On Friday, EFF received the long-awaiting ruling on its 2011 petition to set aside a National Security Letter (NSL) issued to a telecommunications company. The petition challenged the constitutionality of one of five national security letter statutes, 18 U.S.C. § 2709. And what a ruling it was.

Since the first national security letter statute was passed in 1986, the FBI has issued hundreds of thousands of such letters seeking private telecommunications and financial records of Americans without any prior approval from courts. Indeed, for the period between 2003 and 2006 alone, almost 200,000 requests for private customer information were sought pursuant to various NSL statutes.

Today, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a district court order imposing sanctions on Evan Stone, attorney for adult film producer Mick Haig Productions, who improperly issued subpoenas without leave of court to ISPs seeking the identities of anonymous subscribers in a mass end-user copyright infringement case.

Last week, a federal district court judge in Oregon raised eyebrows when he rejected claims that a self-proclaimed Internet investigative journalist did not enjoy the protections of the state’s reporter’s shield law in a defamation lawsuit brought against her by Kevin Padrick, an Oregon attorney who was one of the targets of her online postings. Judge Marco A.